Astronomers have discovered the most distant example of a galaxy in the universe that looks like our home galaxy, the Milky Way. When the universe was just two billion years old, the newfound spiral galaxy, ceers-2112, appears to have featured a bar of stars and gas cutting across its heart, like a slash across a no-smoking sign.
The unexpected presence of the bar in ceers-2112 poses a challenge to existing theoretical models, hinting at potential gaps in our understanding of the physical processes driving galactic formation during the early epochs of the universe.
Astronomers previously thought this galactic structure marks the end of a galaxy’s formative years, so it was expected to be seen only in old galaxies that may have reached full maturity — perhaps those that existed halfway through the evolution of the universe. Indeed, the Hubble Space Telescope’s past observations of galaxy morphologies have shown the early universe hosted very few barred galaxies.
However, the new findings, gleaned from data by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), conclude it may not be necessarily true that barred spirals must’ve roamed the universe for so long. “When the universe had just 15 percent of its life,” Luca Costantin, an astrophysicist at the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid and the lead author of the new study, told Space.com.
The JWST can collect six times more light than Hubble, allowing for more detailed features of faraway galaxies to come into view. Ceers-2112 is observed at a redshift. A team of astronomers has made a groundbreaking discovery by identifying the farthest galaxy resembling our Milky Way.
The Milky Way, a spiral galaxy, sports a similar bar. Scientists suspect the Milky Way’s bar rotates cylindrically, like a toilet roll holder does as you unravel toilet paper, funneling gas into the galaxy’s center and sparking bursts of star formation.